some_stars: (kids! stay in school!)fifty frenchmen can't be wrong ([personal profile] some_stars) wrote,
@ 2013-02-08 08:05 pm UTC
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Crossposts:http://some-stars.livejournal.com/2253483.html
I still haven't quite finished Les Mis, because the ending is turning out to be a big slog of everyone acting like dicks and then also some moral crises the fundamental principles of which are so alien to my own moral sense that I can't possibly get invested in or even respect them. To be fair I don't think Hugo intends for me to respect the terms, per se, but he clearly wants me to respect the crisis and it's just so stupid and wrong that I can't. Mostly it's the dicks, though, that are holding me back. (By which I 90% mean Marius but Valjean is not excused. Poor Cosette, what a pair of douchebags.) I'll get there, but ugh, what a letdown at the end of the literal greatest book ever written. Meanwhile I've been reading lots and lots of fanfic, mostly fanfic where dudes get it on because, well, yes, plus that's what was on AO3 in the bookfic category. But I'm open to recommendations of all kinds!

I've also been browsing the #les miserables tag on Tumblr, which is one of the lowest-quality and highest-traffic tags it has ever been my misfortune to sift through. I did find this food-allergy-themed parody of One Day More, though. That's something.


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ellen_fremedon: a page from the Beowulf manuscript, on a maroon ground (illumination)


[personal profile] ellen_fremedon
2013-02-09 02:44 am UTC (link)
Yeah. I am always surprised by how horrible Marius is when I get to the end. I think I must have misremembered, and then, no, he really is that horrible. I did think [personal profile] cahn had some good thoughts here about Marius as audience stand-in.


the literal greatest book ever written.

My parents have a 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica, which makes absolutely no pretense to objectivity of any kind. Its entry on Les Miserables describes it as "the greatest work of epic or dramatic fiction ever created or conceived."

It's the "or conceived" that gets me. No one has ever written a better book, sure, fine. But I really would like to know on what evidence the Britannica editors so blithely assert that no one has ever even THOUGHT of writing a better one. Did they have access to Lucien's library?

(...actually that would explain a lot and I would totally read that story.)

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minoanmiss: (Minoan Woman by Ileliberte)


[personal profile] minoanmiss
2013-02-09 04:24 am UTC (link)
Thank you for that link to Cahn's meta (and Starry One, I have been loving your Les Mis reading ntoes.)

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